Posts Tagged ‘blastoise’

I should, like, make more of an effort to write in here again. I’ve gotten far too lazy in just barfing my thoughts solely on Twitter, and the temptation to do so has gotten only stronger because of the upgrade to 280 characters.

It’s only Tuesday and this week has already been several kinds of WTF. I knew things would be odd because 3 doctor appointments in one week, but… damn.

Monday: I had to go see my main doctor as a condition of getting my med renewal charges restocked. The doctor is a tiny old Filipino man who doesn’t really talk much (picture someone like the nameless homeroom teacher from Evangelion) but today he was unusually chatty, asking about my BiPAP machine since he has the previous model. Like, REALLY getting into it. Internally I’m like “wait, he actually talks?! Holy crap!”

As an old habit from WAY back when I was in Kaiser, I assumed the doctor would want blood work and did the fasting thing (me being a fatty mcfatderp, it’s probably a periodic check to make sure I didn’t get whacked by the diabetes stick… or maybe because of thyroid stuff. Probably both). And I was right to. BUT, because the doctor had a new, fussy and time-consuming patient ahead of me, there was a long wait for him to actually get to me. That’s not a problem, the fact that LabCorp would be closed before I could get there was. Sooo… I fasted for nothing. Fun times!

(WHY MUST YOU CLOSE SO EARLY, LABCORP? It’s not even a 9 to 5 thing! It’s 9 to 4! An hour makes a huge difference for slowpokes like me!!)

My mother got takeout on the way back, both because a pointless fast is awful and also she hadn’t eaten yet so we were both super-hungry. So the day was salvaged, I guess.

Tuesday: I had to redo the fast, and got up earlier to go do the blood work before lunch hour. More takeout, too! Unusual circumstances, so it’s okay– there wouldn’t have been enough time to go home and make lunch because…

Another doctor visit, only this time I get to hoof it to Eastvale since that’s where Pacific Eye Institute is. (For being such a fancy, lavishly-decorated facility, it gets a ton of Medicaid patients. Huh. The name and appearance implies it would be for rich people.) My old opthalmologist retired, so I got bounced to… basically the next one available, who I saw last week, and he was all “oh I should bounce you to our new keratoconus specialist” and boop, I am asked to return today to see said new person. As awkward as that scenario sounds, it was actually for the best. Why?

New eye doctor, for one, is basically Kal Penn if he had a SLIGHTLY wider head and thick-framed coke bottle glasses. Yay! Also yay: he’s actually getting the ball rolling on my corneal transplant, which has ONLY been in limbo for the past two years since old eye doctor (who was basically William H. Macy but taller and with lighter hair) was super waffly and fat-shamy– like, he was convinced that my keratoconus was a result of my being fat and he thought he could blow off doing the corneal transplant by throwing glaucoma eyedrops at me. It’s not glaucoma, jackass. Your tech flunkies said so.

New eye doctor WOULD have set up the transplant fairly soon, except being new has a few administrative complications. Like most new employees, there’s a bit of a probation period– in his case, it’s a waiting period while he’s authorized to perform surgery at the hospital he was hired at. He doesn’t seem to be bothered much by me being a “patient of size” so I don’t expect much finger-waggling there.

I’m prescribed a second set of eye drops to stack on the brimonidine, only these drops aren’t being used in the “let’s just act like we’re dealing with glaucoma” context, this prednisolone is more of a “let’s try to fix even a little bit of the scarring in the meantime until we can book you for surgery” thing, so at least there’s considerably less bullshit to deal with.

It seems like a really good day so far! I get home and lie down a bit before raid night in WoW. Yeee, we’re gonna finally punch Heroic Kil’jaeden and I’ll still get my pizza later because Tuesday is pizza day! A few minutes before we’re set to begin, I get up to go to Blastoise, but Daisy was on my desk. I didn’t notice her, and she wasn’t aware of me approaching since I wasn’t wearing my slippers, so she got startled and toppled my almost-empty water pitcher that I had moved to my PC desk to make room for sorting my medicine that morning and… uhhh…

It wasn’t a lot of water, but juuuust enough to get into my keyboard and mouse. Aw hell. Welp, I figured both were totally wrecked and I’d have to withdraw from the raid until whenever I could secure replacements. My mood just tanked SUPER hard.

I went back to lounging in bed and– oh, the guild got Ahead of the Curve and WELP THERE GOES MY CHANCE TO GET A KILL VIDEO WITH NERDSCREAMS, FFFFFFF– a few hours later came back to Blastoise to confirm that my stuff was still dead.

It wasn’t. Both the keyboard and mouse recovered.

WHAT.

I’ve never had a good track record with any kind of water damage, however rare it was. I’d lost a nice keyboard and my old Macbook to water damage and I was sure my current keyboard and Naga Chroma were done for… except they survived. Somehow. I should just shut up and be grateful that they aren’t hosed, right?

Now I’m just in this weird… mood whiplash headspace. I was prepared to be just miserable for potentially the rest of the week, and while I appreciate my guild offers to replace my stuff I don’t think I could deal with the shame of having to sponge my way back, not without treating it as a commission and throwing art at them in return. (And it would have been WAY worse if Robert did it. Which is really out of character for him. Bro out-pennypinches Scrooge McDuck, he’s the last person I would expect to volunteer to replace my keyboard and such.) Ahh, residual disability-related guilt sure is fun, isn’t it?

SO. That video? Kinda stalled right now. Basically, a lot of drama and unpredictable noise have made it SUPER-difficult to find a good solid block of time to record the commentary on the Kiros painting time lapse. (Let me remind you that my “room” is not a true room with doors and walls, it is literally a section of the den with a half-wall, and thus I have no real privacy or means of isolating myself from outside noises when people are downstairs.)

BUT I HAVEN’T FORGOTTEN, OKAY? :(

In other news, I have a usable chair again. It’s my old office chair from upstairs, and sinks rather easily because I’m a fatty mcfatbutt (plus it’s a cheap chair), but it’s still way better than a damn shower bench. I still have to stand up a lot for circulation reasons, but I’m okay with that. I recently found out about recliner exercises, this has helped me with I have to sit in my chair for a long time.

Alsoooo… I maaaay be poking around in FFXIV:ARR a bit. Let me assure you that this in no way indicates that I’m affected by the recent drama about WoW and flying and developer transparency (in fact, I’ve been trying to stay away from the forums and even dropped a couple of Twitter followers because I don’t need all that negativity in my life on top of what I already deal with, and the outrage among the playerbase is boiling over from “rabble rabble rabble” to “let’s intimidate and shame people who aren’t on the bandwagon with us” and that’s just Not Cool).

It’s more like I’ve progressed my characters enough where I’m not having to devote, like, two full days out of the week to chain-run LFR on my alts (in addition to daily crafting CDs/Garrison maintenance) where I can actually do other things and play other games like csgo, that you can learn to rank at sites like http://mycsgoboosting.com/guides/csgo-ranking-system. I’m down to two characters that need to run LFR every week, and one of them is two weeks off from being done with that (until 6.2 drops, anyway), as opposed to having to juggle 5+ alts needing to go every week. All that time freed up! (My poor 3DS has been gathering dust since Warlords launched.)

FFXIV has been something I’ve been curious about for quite awhile, but a lot of things have kept me from really acting on it (being tied up in WoW progression, for one, but also just being so exhausted from family drama and the anxiety spikes they cause, it really does take me out for much of the day because that adrenaline and energy spent staving off panic spikes has to come from SOMEWHERE). Some people in my Horde guild play, and they were talking about it during tonight’s raid, which is enough of a nudge to just download the damn client already.

And, like, I pull in enough gold through my Alliance garrisons where I could reliably just pay for my WoW account in tokens, freeing up actual monies to use for my (theoretical-but-probably-happening) FFXIV sub fees.

Having researched the game, it looks like I could actually bring Hikaru back out again (and as a proper tank, no less!) because as you remember, I couldn’t adapt her for WoW– the lore doesn’t exactly allow for Black Dragons that aren’t evil, so Hikaru got benched and Hynderia was made to take her place for the melee/plate-wearing DPS role in my giant pile of characters. And Hynderia’s character has since developed in such a way that there’s really no comparison between the two anymore. (To name one major difference aside from race, Hynderia is very much a lesbian. It was a random idea I had some time ago, and it worked so well. I think it was kind of an “extrapolation” from an accident that happened when writing Ragnarok TWILIGHT episode 2, in which the interaction between Hikaru and Yoshi could be very easily read as the two being romantically interested.)

Something I’m thinking of doing when I’m able to paint again is to reboot the whole “YouTube documentation of the process.” When I get that bored feeling, I remember Minneapolis Best Painting is providing free in person quotes to all prospective customers, so I just hire them when I need to paint something big in my house while I got the guys from Residential Roofing in Palm Beach to also fix my roof. You sorta got this back with the 10-minute compressed versions of my streams, but this new iteration I want to try would include actual commentary about each phase of the work. (in addition to annotations and such)

Yeah. You’d get to hear me talk! Whaaaaat?

I’ve shied away from posting audio because, uh, I don’t really like the sound of my voice, but I realize that’s never going to change and I’m apparently the only one who feels this way. So I guess this also serves to acclimate me to listening to myself talk. This sort of happens already when I’m on Vent for raiding in WoW, because sometimes I hear parts of what I said when other people answer (yay time lag).

I’ve already restored Blastoise’s ability to record his desktop at an acceptable framerate, and everything else is ready software-wise… I just need a not-terrible chair so I won’t be having to stand up every 15 minutes or so, as is the case with this awful shower bench I’m stuck with for now. It’s barely tolerable for when I’m playing WoW, but unacceptable for painting because getting up so often ruins my concentration.

So, hi. Yeah. Not much to talk about lately on the art side, right? I promise it’s really not so much about World of Warcraft popping up like a fiend (hi, Warlords of Draenor) and more about the general lack of table space to fit my Intuos3 tablet on and how EXTREMELY uncomfortable it is to work with that. Ugh. It just obliterates any desire to open up Painter and go to town. I just can’t do it.

THANKFULLY within the month that’s going to be a non-issue, because after over a year of going without Blastoise, he’s finally being moved downstairs, dual monitors and all. Finally. I love my little ninja MacBook, she’s been able to handle Painter (and WoW, which is even more surprising) way better than I ever expected her to, but there’s really no comparing her to Blastoise’s epic awesomeness (16GB of RAM? Yes please). For us WoW players, it’s like comparing an iLVL 450 item from a Heroic 5-man to an iLVL 528 from Raid Finder. You just can’t do it. Too great of a difference.

But but BUT

It’s on the edge of getting better. So, so much better.

Details are forthcoming (but if you know anything about my gear and graphics stuff in general, it should be stupidly easy to figure out), but let’s just say that if all goes well, by the end of the year I will have the digital painter’s upgrade to END ALL UPGRADES, and that’s not something I throw about trivially. Seriously, this is the ultimate step up from an Intuos3, there is literally nothing out there that is better than [bleep!] that I know of. I have spent years looking at its many iterations and thinking “there’s no way I’d ever be able to get one of those” and by some twist in the cosmos, I’m about to get one. Oh man, you guys. It’s the stuff of dreams. It’s like getting a Legendary weapon in WoW. It’s like… well, if we want to go with the Pokemon metaphor (since this upgrade is going on Blastoise), it’s going from Hydro Pump to Hydro CANNON. Aah. The more I think about it, the more hyped up I get about all the stuff I’ll be able to do.